Month: November 2018

Benjamin Powell, co-author of Socialism Sucks, has an article at the Independent Institute asserting that “Democratic Socialists” really need to learn more about socialism. If those who declare themselves to be socialists went to actual socialist countries like Venezuela to see first hand how bad things are there because of socialism — just like the old Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, etc. — then maybe they might have a change of heart.

Here is an excerpt:

But here’s the problem. The word “democratic” isn’t magic fairy dust when put in front of “socialist.” The socialist portion of democratic socialism still means the state—the government—has undue control over economic decision-making that will result in stagnation.

And, as history has shown over and over again, you can’t really have a free society and free people without economic freedom. Democratic freedoms and economic freedoms go hand in hand.

In his 1944 book, TheRoad to Serfdom, Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek made the case that democracy is only compatible with competitive capitalism and that once a country becomes “dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.”

The reason is simple. Centrally planned socialist economic systems necessarily concentrate economic power in the hands of government officials and planners. Without such power they can’t hope to “run things.” Yet this same power limits citizens’ ability to freely exercise their power when they become dissatisfied with the government. That’s because the government can punish them financially if they choose to oppose those in power.

Why are many of the people on the left of such an authoritarian mentality? They are so authoritarian in their worship of the federal government and its illicit powers and feared losing the power so much they disrupted the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, and engaged in so much obvious cheating during the recent mid-term elections. (Not that Republicans weren’t engaged in cheating or at least questionable behavior as well, such as in Georgia.)

During the Kavanaugh hearings, Sen. Cruella Harris began interrupting Chairman Grassfed as soon as he began the hearings, and it went downhill from there, especially with “Dr.” Ford who “Must Be Believed At All Times!” and Kavanaugh screaming how much he loves beer and telling us what a moron he is by keeping calendars going back to 1982. (Who does that?)

Meanwhile, informed people with a brain actually objected to Kavanaugh based on his terrible rulings rubber-stamping tyranny, and his being a corrupt bureaucrat. But no, the fanatics on the left are concerned about abortion. That’s what they care about. And “Free Health Care for ALL!”and all that.

The fanatics believe that the Supreme Court is the God of government, that those 9 robed bureaucrats have the absolute final say on our freedom (and our enslavement). So it’s so important that they have to interrupt hearings, harass senators who voted for Kavanaugh, and cheat in elections. What a life.

But, as Tom Woods points out in a recent article, especially in his quoting of James Madison, the federal judicial branch is the final decision-maker on constitutional conflicts only between the branches of the federal government (judicial, legislative and executive), but NOT the final decision-maker on conflicts between the federal government and the states.

As Woods has explained in the past, the states, after all, created the federal government, not the other way around. The people of the states are the “boss” of the feds, and the agents of the federal government are the states’ “employees.” Unfortunately, that has been turned around by authoritarians (especially reinforced by Lincoln) who believe that whatever the federal government says, goes. “You will report to us your earnings, where you work or whom you employ, we will take a portion of your wealth whether you like it or not, we will spy on you and know the personal details of your private life and you will not know what we are up to, we’ll just mark everything ‘classified,’ and so on…”

So that stuff that the bureaucrats in Washington have been doing, that fools like Brett Kavanaugh have been rubber-stamping out of loyalty to the Regime and its racket, is unconstitutional, illicit, and criminal. This is why the writers of the Bill of Rights included the Tenth Amendment, which reads, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

Which is not very well written, by the way. It should have explicitly stated that the people of the states shall nullify any federal government rule, law or order on them whose enforcement they conclude would be in violation of their liberty, persons or property. Otherwise, the Founders needlessly created a federal government and ratified a questionableConstitution, going against the very principles of their Declaration of Independence.

Thomas Jefferson and others endorsed that idea of nullification which many people on the left now ignorantly perceive as having to do with racism or “slavery,” even though some states engaged in nullification during the Civil War period when they nullified Fugitive Slave Laws (which Lincoln strongly endorsed and enforced, by the way).

As Woods wrote in an essay in his Liberty Classroom, “nullification was used against slavery, as when northern states did everything in their power to obstruct the enforcement of the fugitive-slave laws, with the Supreme Court of Wisconsin going so far as to declare the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 unconstitutional and void. In Ableman v. Booth (1859), the U.S. Supreme Court scolded it for doing so. In other words, modern anti-nullification jurisprudence has its roots in the Supreme Court’s declarations in support of the Fugitive Slave Act. Who’s defending slavery here?”

But as I wrote in this article, we are now slaves of the federal government.

Concocting a centralized, ruling federal government was a mistake made by the Revolutionaries. Besides the social fascists and authoritarians on the left, now we have a Donald Trump who claims that his job is “running the country,” which, as Richard Ebeling pointed out in this very informative new article, is a “claim to abrogate the liberty of each and every member of that society to have the freedom to run their own life as they peacefully and honestly see fit in voluntary and mutually agreed-upon association with their fellow human beings for their respective betterment as they define it.”

One of the latest examples of the absurdity of this centralized power apparatus in Washington is that the bureaucrats are going to bring criminal charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, because he provided the means for whistleblowers to expose the criminality of the federal bureaucrats and their goons. Whistleblowers such as Bradley Manning with the Iraq War Logs, the Afghanistan War Logs, the diplomatic cables leaks, the “Collateral Murder” video, and all the rest.

As I wrote above, the criminals of the regime classify whatever they can to avoid embarrassing disclosures, evade transparency, get away with murder, and punish whistleblowers. Bradley Manning, by the way, was viciously persecuted by Obama’s regime, not Bush, with 3 years of solitary confinement pre-trial and a kangaroo trial and sentencing. (Although I think the main reason the SJW-in-Chief Barack Obama then commuted Manning’s 35-year sentence was because Manning is a “transgender.” Those are the things Obama et al. really care about.)

You see, as many people have noted now in the Obama DOJ and FBI’s surveillance abuses and how the Obama administration was so bad with civil liberties and freedom of speech and his war on the Press, we now have Cruella Harris and Pocahontas and all their moonbat followers drooling to take the apparatus of power back so THEY can once again use the spying powers against enemies and enforce their beloved police state on the people.

Matthew Silber writes about defusing a second civil war through peaceful secession. (In my view, the choices are voluntary, peaceful secession and decentralization, OR, let the society in Amerika collapse with chaos, violence and bloodshed. I prefer the former, not the latter.)

These recent elections, with all the cheating going on Florida and other states, seem to be an exaggerated version of many times in the past in which we’ve seen people who will do anything for their immediate gratification fix for power and control over the lives of others. I am reminded by an article I wrote in 2013 on Keynesianism and its policies of selfishness, irresponsibility and immediate gratification. So, I will repost that article here.

Our fanatically Keynesian President Barack Obama believes that governments should spend money they don’t have and put the country into debt. So he is whining to Republicans to continue raising the debt ceiling so the federal government can continue on its wild spending spree.

And Obama has the nerve to say that the opposing Party’s not wanting to do the President’s bidding by irresponsibly raising the debt ceiling is “extorting” the President. He claims that it is extortion when some of the people’s representatives tell the Dear Leader to stop stealing from our grandchildren!

This Obama person is just as bad as the Bush that preceded him. And the power-grabbers of the Federal Reserve and the banksters are just as dishonest and irresponsible.

But they are merely reflecting the general population now, the selfish, impatient and id-oriented population of America.

And some people are speculating that Janet Yellen, Vice Chairman of the Fed’s Board of Governors, will be picked to be the next Chairman of the Federal Reserve System, replacing Ben Bernanke.

Like Bernanke, Ms. Yellen apparently believes in using the apparatus of government intervention to control economic matters. And she certainly favors Keynesian policies, “easy money” and continuing with the self-indulgent spending habits.

The Economic Collapse Blog’s Michael Snyder notes how Ms. Yellen was totally clueless in 2007, really believing that those artificial housing and other stimulus would be “still likely to achieve a relatively smooth adjustment path.” And then in 2010 she testified that she did not see the meltdown and collapse coming, as the current Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, also did not see it coming.

And in response to The Bernank’s recent “no taper” announcement, Ron Paul asked, morally what right does Bernanke have “to take away 2% of our purchasing power deliberately? What right does he have to punish the elderly who save money?”

Dr. Paul warned against further destruction of the dollar and malinvestment caused by artificial interest rates.

Actually, as long as any kind of economic activity is artificial, or artificially “stimulated” by monopolistic and unaccountable governmental intrusions, there’s a good chance that that will cause malinvestment.

And the other part of that is the intrusions are coming from some central planner, such as the Fed and its high-and-mighty Chairman or from an act of Congress, for that matter. What you will then have is “planned chaos,” as Ludwig von Mises pointed out.

In contrast, with freedom and free markets consumers and producers are left free to plan their own economic matters. In a system of more freedom and randomness, you have less chaos because such a system is freed from the destructive intrusions of those bureaucratic buffoons and parasites and their “fatal conceit” that guides them.

But sadly, the majority of people in America do not appreciate that freedom, independence and responsibility, in our modern age of decadence and covetousness.

America has become a society in which irresponsibility and immediate gratification are institutionalized, praised and rewarded. And that is exactly what the Keynesian economics of Janet Yellen, Ben Bernanke, Paul Krugman and millions of others promotes.

The truth is, those folks of the Keynesian way of thinking don’t even practice economics — their love is for politics and in strengthening the political class.

You see, at some point private economic matters in America became politicized. And it was the politicians who exploited crises, panics and economic downturns and they then sold a bunch of snake oil to the desperate masses as a means of the politicians grabbing more and more political and police power over the people.

And, coinciding with the decline of critical thinking in America, the politicians’ minions in academia and the Press supported the ideas of deficit spending and promoting debts as a way to get out of recessions and depressions.

Reflecting the mental laziness reinforced by government schooling, it makes the unthinking academics and pundits feel good when they are relieved of having to make any effort in solving the problems that caused those recessions and depressions in the first place, and instead they can just get their monetary meds right away. (Hmmm. Can we get Big Pharma in on this?)

But these kinds of irresponsible, immediate gratification habits are like drug addictions, and like drug addicts the spending addicts put their entire family into the poor house. And this is what the power-grabbing politicians want, encouraging the people to then beg them for more “easy money” and other wealth-redistribution schemes to bail them out.

As long as they are further enriched and empowered over others, the politicians and bureaucrats get what they crave with each new power-grabbing vote in Congress, just as the Fed’s manipulations empower the banksters to get new money to fund their bonuses while the politicians’ Fed-stimulated inflation steals even more from the people.

However, America’s immediate gratification society can be seen in other areas now. For example, the cops and prosecutors, and “national security” bureaucrats who get away with warrantless searches and stopping and frisking innocent people. Why wait for a judge to sign a warrant? That takes too long. They crave to do their searches immediately. And even when there’s no suspicion of specific individuals they want to search anyway. And why go through the trouble of coming across some actual individual who is suspicious to then do searches of his emails or phone records? Instead let’s search through and collect and keep a database of all Americans’ emails and phone records, and that way we can then find our needle in the haystack.

So that is a current example of the kind of immediate gratification mindset that Americans have developed in many areas of life — not just economic — over the past century, especially since the implementation of the income tax and the Federal Reserve System.

But such behaviors are those of irresponsibility, and only promote the satisfying of one’s immediate desires with total disregard for ethics and for the future (or for the rights of innocent people in the case of the “security” fanatics).

People want “easy money,” and they want it now. (Especially the banksters.) Don’t wait until you have enough money saved or have enough of an income to afford to buy a house — get a loan NOW and get a mortgage now anyway, and get that house. And spend as much as you can on your credit card, and put yourself in debt. Who cares about your family’s future, as long as you get that stuff you want now.

And the banksters want easy money and bailouts, because they know that regardless how irresponsible their lending practices and their investments are (with their customers‘ money, just as Congress is with taxpayers’ money), they are guaranteed by the government to be free from bankruptcy. And they will keep their jobs (while you lose yours).

You see, such a Keynesian mindset is especially thriving in those who want to have some central authority, the Fed or Congress, to act as “stimulator” of the population’s prosperity, and to dish out food stamps and other goodies, as well as artificially-stimulated interest rates and “easy money” (for the banksters).

Sadly, the masses are being fed the false belief that they are benefiting from these government bureaucrats and those monetary central planners like Helicopters Ben and Janet who hand out the easy money like candy.

But, as Lew Rockwell recently noted, it is the State and its agents who are enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else, while the advocates of freedom and independence, such as Ron Paul, are the ones who want the people liberated from the State’s tentacles and from its exploitation of the people’s labor and livelihoods.

It would be easier to get more people to see that, if only they could overcome their long-ingrained habits of short-sightedness, and their blind faith in the State as a savior.

Jacob Hornberger explains what many people don’t seem to be able to get as far as the effects of the drug war are concerned. The crimes, violence, drug cartels, drug lords like Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman now on trial in New York, are results of the drug war itself, not the drugs. Government interventionism and central planning in drug “control,” or attempted control. More problems result from the interventionists’ drug war, and their solutions are more interventionism, which causes more problems. And as Hornberger points out, it’s the same thing regarding immigration.

Nearly a week after the 2018 elections, a winner has been decided in Arizona to replace the retiring U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake. It appears that the people of Arizona have narrowly selected Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema over Congresswoman Martha McSally. Arizona is turning from a solidly red state to a purple one now.

In the 2018 elections, nutty far-leftist loony-tunes Kyrsten Sinema had some serious issues, supports government-controlled health care and is a known feminazi. But warmonger Martha McSally also had some issues.

McSally ousted Kelli Ward, the genuine Tea Party candidate, in the Republican primary. My conclusion is that Martha McSally is a not a Tea Party conservative, but a Big Government warmonger militarist.

Warmonger McSally promotes sanctions on Russia for no good reason. Sanctions imposed by a government onto another entire country mainly affect the other country’s civilian population and should be considered a war crime. Targeting civilians is a war crime. McSally also supports totalitarian policies of NDAA and believes that the welfare queens of the military/security contractors need to be fed more taxpayer dollars than they already get! McSally is a True Believer.

But we probably haven’t seen the last of war criminal Martha McSally just yet, as there’s a chance that Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey might appoint her to replace Jon Kyl who was appointed to fill the rest of John McCain‘s Senate seat. Kyl has stated that he might only serve until the end of 2018.

Now, I referred to Martha McSally as a war criminal, not just a warmonger, and I believe that is correct. She took part in enforcing no-fly zones in Iraq during the mid-1990s. Sadly, many people including oldsters are not aware of the U.S. government’s aggressions in the Middle East during the 1990s. Many have been made to believe that everything began after 9/11/2001. Nope.

In 1991, President George H.W. Bush started a war of aggression on Iraq for no good reason. It was for oil, although in my view given that Bush was a longtime CIA flunky he probably had even more sinister intentions. Knowing that the Cold War was coming to an end with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and needing a new “enemy” to replace the Soviet commies and to justify the national security state’s always increasing budgets, boondoggles and extravagances, that was the right time to start a new war, and a new campaign of provoking foreigners, particularly in the Middle East and particularly Muslim-majority countries.

One thing that the U.S. military did in that 1991 war that George H.W. Bush started was that they bombed and destroyed civilian Iraqi water and sewage treatment centers, which forced the Iraqi civilians to have to use untreated water.

A Harvard School of Public Health team visited Iraq in the months after the war and found epidemic levels of typhoid and cholera as well as pervasive acute malnutrition. The Post noted,

“In an estimate not substantively disputed by the Pentagon, the [Harvard] team projected that ‘at least 170,000 children under five years of age will die in the coming year from the delayed effects’ of the bombing.”

The U.S. military understood the havoc the 1991 bombing unleashed. A 1995 article entitled ‘The Enemy as a System’ by John Warden, published in the Air Force’s Airpower Journal, discussed the benefits of bombing ‘dual-use targets’ and noted,

“A key example of such dual-use targeting was the destruction of Iraqi electrical power facilities in Desert Storm…. [Destruction] of these facilities shut down water purification and sewage treatment plants. As a result, epidemics of gastroenteritis, cholera, and typhoid broke out, leading to perhaps as many as 100,000 civilian deaths and a doubling of the infant mortality rate.”

The article concluded that the U.S. Air Force has a “vested interest in attacking dual-use targets” that undermine “civilian morale.”

According to Kelley Vlahos at The American Conservative, “The U.S. left an estimated 320 metric tons of DU (depleted uranium) on the battlefield after the first Gulf War.” Which they then added to in their constant bombing of Iraq in the 2nd war against Iraq starting in 2003 that Bush Sr.’s son, George W. Bush started also for no good reason.

Under Bush Sr. and President Bill Clinton the U.S. government continued the sanctions and no-fly zones throughout the 1990s, in which hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, many of them children, died from disease and infant mortality. The no-fly zones, enforced by the U.S. military including Martha McSally, prevented Iraq from receiving medical supplies and construction materials to repair the destroyed water and sewage treatment centers. The U.S. government even made it a crime for people to bring medical supplies into Iraq. The bureaucrats of the U.S. regime were paranoid that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein would use the supplies to make chemical weapons. And this after all the bombing that U.S. military and other UN forces inflicted on Iraq!

McSally was selected for fighter pilot school in 1993, but it was another year before she actually arrived. After completion of her training, she was deployed to Kuwait in January 1995.

“I was a young and new fighter pilot and here I was in Kuwait,” she said. “On my first flight over Iraq, we were enforcing the no-fly zone, and as I crossed the Kuwait/Iraq border, I’ll never forget the feeling I had that I had asked for this and now I was here.”

In 1996 Lesley Stahl did a story on 60 Minutes on the sanctions and interviewed then-U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright, who said the price of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians’ deaths was “worth it” in ousting Saddam Hussein from Iraqi leadership.

Even though the sanctions didn’t effect in ousting Saddam Hussein, the U.S. government did accomplish in committing war crimes, by Bush Sr.’s starting the war in the first place, destroying civilian water and sewer treatment centers and imposing sadistic sanctions and no-fly zones, which caused the deaths of up to a million people by the year 2000, before 9/11.

Last week I heard Martha McSally on Sean Hannity’s radio show and she seemed emotional in her describing her pride in flying over Iraq and enforcing no-fly zones. True Believer, for sure.

And I don’t mean to pick on just Martha McSally, because she probably really believes that she was doing good, because like many Americans she was probably very well indoctrinated to believe that U.S. foreign policy is above being questioned, as are the moral scruples of the bureaucrats who start the wars against foreigners. But there is a culture within the U.S. of militarism, authoritarianism and primitivism. “We were just following orders,” and all that. Obediently and unthinkingly, just go over and invade other countries and bomb them, kill innocent civilians and be a brainwashed sheeple in rationalizing the evil.

So seeing that Americans would accept any lies from their government, especially following the Pentagon Papers, U.S. government bureaucrats knew they could get away with anything, as long as they rationalized it with the necessary propaganda, such as the propaganda for the war of aggression on Iraq in 1991 that George H.W. Bush started for no good reason, and all the mainstream news media stenographers and enablers who helped them.

The new Congress beginning in January, 2019 will have several new military vets from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as well as CIA or former CIA apparatchiks. And add McSally to that list, either when or if she replaces Jon Kyl in the next year, or if she runs again for the U.S. Senate in 2020, which would be likely.

Both Jacob Hornberger and Laurence Vance have provocative articles today. People who were raised to not question the government’s schemes (that is, most people in America) will probably not appreciate either article. Sometimes I refer to such people as “sheeple,” or “brainwashed sheeple,” but I mean no offense or insult.

For example, Jacob Hornberger says that the U.S. soldiers who died in World War I died for nothing, for no good reason. In my view, most people have been conditioned to believe otherwise. They don’t want to consider the possibility that the President sent Americans off to die for no good reason. In fact, many people who might be reading this are already clicking their bookmarks to go to the next blog or website. They’re True Believers, in my view.

But, as Hornberger stated, the U.S. soldiers who died in World War I did die for nothing. He notes:

Ironically, in other to wage his war Wilson had to resort to conscription. When one has to force men to fight in a war, that’s a pretty good sign that that is not a good war. Moreover, forcing men to serve the state, especially by killing and dying in a foreign war, obviously destroyed the freedom of those who were conscripted. What could be worse than dying for “freedom” when you’ve been forced to die for “freedom.”

Hornberger says that Woodrow Wilson’s legacy with World War I includes World War II, which may very well have not occurred had Wilson not entered the U.S. into World War I. And results of the second World War included the national security state and the government’s war on liberty and privacy, as well as the sacrificed non-interventionist foreign policy of America’s founders.

And Laurence Vance comments on the “Thank you for your service” catchphrase associated with the slavessacrificial animals U.S. military personnel who made themselves useful to serve the egos and financial interests of government bureaucrats and their cronies in Washington.

Vance begins his article by listing many people who should be thanked for their service, including

To those who work on holidays: Thank you for your service.

To those who work on weekends: Thank you for your service.

To those who drive cabs or UBER in the middle of the night: Thank you for your service.

To those who take care of the elderly living in nursing homes who suffer with dementia: Thank you for your service.

The list continues and seems almost endless. And then he continues by stating, “Sorry veterans. There is nothing about your service that is worthy of thanks.”

And he lists reason why, including:

We don’t thank you for following immoral orders.

We don’t thank you for fighting unjust wars.

We don’t thank you for serving Uncle Sam instead of the country.

We don’t thank you for going to countries where you had no business going.

We don’t thank you for fighting senseless wars.

We don’t thank you for acting as the world’s policeman.

We don’t thank you for bombing, maiming, and killing for the state.

We don’t thank you for engaging in offense instead of defense.

We don’t thank you for making widows and orphans.

We don’t thank you for invading and occupying countries.

There are several more reasons as well.

But as we hear constantly from the talk radio ditto-heads, at sporting events, and all over Amerika, most people are gullible and have been believing the lies of the regime in Washington the past century. They don’t see our soldiers as “invading and occupying countries” and “making widows and orphans” and all the rest. Or, if U.S. soldiers were sent to invade other countries, it was probably for a good reason. Americans have convinced themselves of that, because they just can’t fathom the thought that U.S. bureaucrats in Washington would send American boys off to die for no good reason, or for specious reasons. Sad.

As a follow-up to my rant yesterday on the protesters who have been harassing government officials at restaurants, I am going to reiterate my support. And reiterate my condemnation of criminal thugs terrorizing Tucker Carlson’s family at his home, as well. Carlson is not a government official.

However, many of the protesters’ motivations are not in favor of dismantling the powers of the government that sics government enforcers onto innocent people, unfortunately. Many of the “protesters” and harassers are in favor of their own “liberal police state,” in which they want to sic the enforcers onto innocent people who disobey the left’s fascist mandates, intrusive regulations, and so forth. Liberals and progressives are as much police statists as the conservatives, warmongers and drug warriors.

But as I wrote yesterday, of course the citizens should bother, annoy, harass, make fun of, taunt, humiliate, and shame those government bureaucrats at public places, such as Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell. Those apparatchiks have been supporting and voting for terrible, totalitarian anti-liberty legislation such as NDAA that empowers government agents to arrest and detain indefinitely citizens without charges or suspicion, voting for the various laws involving the drug war in which innocent people’s homes are criminally broken into by enforcers who terrorize and ransack the homes of innocent people who supposedly disobeyed government prohibitions of having a plant, or other Soviet-like diktats. These bureaucrats should be harassed, taunted, and shamed into deciding to repeal all that totalitarian crap!

And yesterday I wrote that most of these bureaucrats are “life-long parasites, and/or apologists for the State’s evil,” including Sarah Huckabee Sanders, that I described as the White House propagandist, which is what she is. If you look at Sanders’s Wikipedia bio, it states that at age 10 she was already working on one of her father Gomer’s political campaigns.

So Gomer already had his daughter Sarah indoctrinated to worship the false god of the State early on, in my view, which is the case with many people in America, in and out of government. In college Sanders majored in political science and mass communications (i.e. government propaganda). In all her bios online I can’t find any evidence that she ever worked in the private sector. Just political campaigns and government. Yech.

And yes, many of today’s American Christians worship their false god, the government in Washington, as well as government rulers in general and their enforcers. And I think that includes the Huckabees, Sarah and her father Mike, a.k.a. Gomer.

Many are True Believers in this nationalistic “American Exceptionalism” theology that excuses U.S. government criminality in the name of trying to prevent people from getting drugs, and in the name of “spreading democracy” (another false god), i.e. warmongering.

Laurence Vance, who in my view is certainly more of an expert on the Bible and Christianity than Mike Huckabee, has written many articles and blog posts on Christians’ false worship of government as a god.

Huckabee disparages redistribution of wealth, public assistance, abortion, Obamacare, out-of-wedlock births, public employee unions, government debt and deficits, tax increases, the estate tax, and government stimulus programs….On Social Security, Huckabee even calls for raising the retirement age, cutting benefits, delaying payments to the elderly by giving them tax incentives to keep working, and offering those who don’t need Social Security the option of a tax-free, lump-sum benefit payable at their death to their chosen beneficiary in lieu of collecting Social Security benefits. On Medicare, he calls for raising the age of eligibility. Yet, Huckabee falls short of labeling Social Security and Medicare what they really are – redistribution of wealth schemes that he condemns – and calling for their elimination. This is the problem with Huckabee and most Republicans and conservatives – they fall short, too short and too often. So, out of one side of his mouth Huckabee can disparage the things he does, but out of the other side he can support government-funded school breakfasts, “the right of every citizen to a free public education,” vouchers for Medicare recipients, elimination of the home mortgage interest deduction, the FairTax with its public-assistance, wealth-redistributing prebate, the Race to the Top federal program, a “reasonable deficit” of no more than 3 percent of GDP, and “hefty fines and prison time” for employers who choose to hire whom they wish.

…

With Huckabee being a Baptist preacher, one would think that he might call for missionaries to go to Iraq and Afghanistan and convert Muslims to Christianity instead of calling for U.S. soldiers to go and kill them: “We’ve had too many of our troops spending too much of their time painting schools and digging wells. They should be allowed to focus on killing Islamic extremists who want us all to die.”

In other words, today’s Christians and conservatives are like most True Believers in American Exceptionalism, blindly and obediently believing the government’s propaganda in the name of justifying wars of aggression and rationalizing murdering innocents overseas, and justifying the Amerikan police state. The collectivism of the 20th century continues to this day.

And also, why do the Exceptionalists never or rarely question the income tax? We never hear them criticize the government in its theft of private wealth and property, because most people are brainwashed to believe that their worshiped government authorities are entitled to the people’s earnings and wealth. And that includes conservatives and Christians who believe that crap.

And then there’s the drug war. While many Christians happily consume their own drug of choice, their beer and booze, they have no problem with siccing government police on peaceful people who happen to have some drug or plant that a bureaucrat doesn’t want them to have. On the drug war, Mike Huckabee is a True Believer in the Police State.

The burden of proof is on Christian drug warriors. Where did the Apostle Paul, in his travels throughout the Roman Empire, ever express support for any type of legislation or state action against vice, immorality, or sin? He certainly told Christians how they should live their life, and even provided lists of vices, immoral actions, and sins that Christians should avoid. Things like: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, covetousness, anger, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication, effeminacy, idolatry, hatred, strife, reveling, witchcraft, evil speaking, lying, and bitterness. But Paul never expressed a desire for the civil authorities to arrest, fine, or imprison anyone for engaging in these things. And neither do modern Christians. Just like they don’t call for the government to prosecute people for committing one of the seven deadly sins of pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust. So what is so special, so egregious, about someone using drugs?

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Christian(s) should only use persuasion. Persuasion, not coercion. Persuasion, not legislation. Persuasion, not legal action. Persuasion, not threats. Persuasion, not compulsion. Persuasion, not violence. Persuasion, not incarceration. The weapons of our warfare are not carnal” (2 Corinthians 10:4). There are, unfortunately, too many people in the United States—including too many Christians—who want to remake society in their own image and compel others to live only in ways that they approve of. Did you ever notice that there is no shortage of Americans—including no shortage of American Christians—willing to kill for the military, torture for the CIA, wiretap for the FBI, grope for the TSA, and destroy property for the DEA? It is not just libertarians who can appeal to the wisdom of Ludwig von Mises: “He who wants to reform his countrymen must take resource to persuasion. This alone is the democratic way of bringing about changes. If a man fails in his endeavors to convince other people of the soundness of his ideas, he should blame his own disabilities. He should not ask for a law, that is, for compulsion and coercion by the police.” That is the spirit of New Testament Christianity. And Mises was a nonreligious Jew, not a Christian.

The problem with many of these people is that they worship the government in Washington, the high-and-mighty rulers, and their enforcers and the military. False gods. But what bureaucrats and their enforcers have been doing to innocent, peaceful people have been evil criminal acts in the name of “enforcement” of bureaucratic edicts.

All this totalitarianism is exactly why the Founding Fathers created America, to protect the people from government violence!

So it is good that the people (aware of the risks of possible false arrest and false imprisonment, of course) harass, taunt, and shame Ted Baxter Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell et al. into rethinking their positions and votes and make them decide to vote and pass legislation to repeal and dismantle the Nazi-like police state, including DHS, TSA, ICE, DEA, NDAA, and so on. Congressional bureaucrats also need to be pressured to pass legislation to close down those U.S. military bases in all parts of the world that are not U.S. territories. They don’t belong there! Those are occupations, the wars our government has been starting against other countries have been criminal wars of aggression. But the Amerikan warvangelicals believe otherwise, sadly.

However, obviously it is not realistic to get power-grabbers to willfully let go of their unjust and undeserved powers over the people. As Jim Davies wrote, regarding the unrealistic possibility of a libertarian President,

…the change has to come bottom-up, not top-down. It must not – it cannot – be imposed from above, it must be demanded from beneath. Government will vanish not when a President announces it will cease to exist at year’s end, or whenever, but when it is universally seen to be so destructive that nobody will work for it. When all its employees walk out, there will be no need for an election, nobody will be over-ruled and nobody will riot.

Reasons to leave government employ are offered in TinyURL.com/QuitGov – pass that simple URL around – but that short site will not suffice on its own, to provide the in-depth education needed. For that, TOLFA or an equivalent must be offered to everyone – not just those now in “government service” but to all who might replace them when they quit.

Perhaps the protesters can harass, bother, taunt and humiliate the government employees, the apparatchiks of the vicious criminal regime (such as Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell and Sarah Huckabee Sanders) that they will decide to quit government “work” and instead go into the private sector, and others will follow.